Author Cullen Murphy talks to Terry Gross about the use of torture during the Inquisition:

Many people in the Bush administration were insisting [it] was not torture at all. The Inquisition was actually very clear on the matter. It obviously was torture. That’s why they were using it.

The director Kathryn Bigelow has faced a great deal of criticism for her depictions of torture in her film Zero Dark Thirty, about the killing of Osama bin Laden. She responded to that criticism this week in the LA Times. Here, too, is the Fresh Air interview from 2009 with Bigelow about The Hurt Locker.

The idea that the Pope would authorize the use of something as heinous as torture by priests or people working for priests is a pretty astonishing development. Ultimately, the justification that it invokes is the same one anyone uses when they’re using torture for reasons that are not sadistic and that is, in essence: ‘The moral cause that we’re engaged in is too important to settle for half-measures.’ … When you read accounts of torture, you get the unmistakable impression that the people doing the torture or conducting the torture — somewhere inside them, they think they are saving souls.

— Cullen Murphy, on accounts of torturers from the first Inquisition.

A few years ago, the intelligence agencies had some transcripts released … of interrogations that were done at Guantanamo and the interrogations done by the Inquisition were surprisingly similar and just as detailed. … [They were] virtually verbatim.

— On today’s Fresh Air, Cullen Murphy draws parallels between some of the interrogation techniques used in previous centuries with the ones used today.

Journalist Peter Godwin secretly went to Zimbabwe to witness the 2008 President Election. This is what he saw: “They tortured tens of thousands of people. But interestingly, they didn’t kill thousands of people. They killed hundreds of people but they tortured vast numbers of people. And then they released them back to their communities so they acted like human billboards — they were advertisements for what happens if you oppose the regime.” [complete interview and book excerpt here]